Convenors
Alessandra Decataldo, University of Milano-Bicocca
alessandra.decataldo@unimib.it
Elena Andreoni, University of Trento
elena.andreoni@unitn.it ; elena.andreoni@unimib.it.
Ethnography has long rested on a temporal premise: researchers share time with the people they study. Fabian (1983) called this coevalness and showed how anthropology denied it by placing its others in another time. Birth (2008) adds that coevalness is not secured by mere co-presence but by taking seriously the temporal frameworks participants themselves use. Extended fieldwork has also been valued because repetition becomes visible as difference (Otto, 2013), and because waiting alongside participants shows how uncertainty is lived (Auyero, 2012).
Netnography (Kozinets, 2020) reconfigures this premise. Platforms combine live interaction with persistent archives: researchers may follow conversations as they unfold, read them months later, or retrieve years of posts at once. Participants write without knowing how their stories will end; researchers reading archives often do. Platforms also differ: forum threads can be read out of sequence, whereas messaging apps flow in real time (Decataldo & Andreoni, 2026). We call chronographies these platform-specific configurations of presence, archival depth, and temporal distance. They shape how researchers manage their own time, delimit the field, and stand towards participants’ open futures. Observing a conversation, taking part in it, and reading its traces afterwards are distinct epistemic positions. Work on active versus passive presence (Costello et al., 2017), patchwork fieldwork (Günel et al., 2020), trace-based approaches (Geiger & Ribes, 2011), and the methodological diversity of netnography (Delli Paoli & D’Auria, 2025) offers starting points; this panel asks how time itself is managed and shared.
We invite empirically grounded papers that describe and analyse similarities and differences between traditional ethnography and netnography in how time is managed and shared between researchers and the people studied. Suitable settings include communities structured by waiting and uncertainty: health, illness, and care (chronic illness, mental health, caregiving, reproduction); migration, asylum, and precarious work; justice-seeking, activism, and digital mourning. Comparisons across platforms with different archival and ephemeral affordances (forums, social networks, messaging apps) are especially welcome, as are studies combining online and offline fieldwork.
Papers should show how these temporal conditions affect observation, participation, field duration, positionality, and obligations towards participants, such as consent and anonymity. The panel aims at comparative discussion across cases: what persists, what changes, and what is lost of the traditional ethnographic temporal contract when fieldwork moves online.
Open questions
- How do researchers and participants share time in netnography, compared with traditional ethnography, when interaction is live, delayed, or archived?
- Does coevalness remain a condition of ethnographic knowledge online, and what takes its place when it cannot be achieved?
- Which chronographies do forums, social networks, and messaging apps produce through archives, threads, feeds, notifications, and ephemeral content?
- How do waiting and uncertainty, as participants live them, appear in online traces, and how does knowing later outcomes shape interpretation?
- How do researchers manage fieldwork time online (duration, intermittency, accumulated past material), and what follows for the depth of their knowledge?
- When does an online field begin and end, and how do researchers decide?
- How do comparable temporal experiences (waiting for a diagnosis, a visa, a ruling) take shape in offline and online settings?
- How do obligations towards participants (consent, anonymity, accountability) change with the time between posting and study?
Keywords
Waiting; temporal asymmetry; platform affordances; archival presence;
ephemeral/persistent
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Media and platform studies; Digital sociology; Ethnographic methodology and qualitative research; Anthropology of online communities; Philosophy of temporality and epistemology of digital knowledge; Data science and computational research
References
Auyero, J. (2012). Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Duke University Press.
Birth, K. (2008). The creation of coevalness and the danger of homochronism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14(1), 3–20.
Costello, L., McDermott, M.-L., & Wallace, R. (2017). Netnography: Range of practices, misperceptions, and missed opportunities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1), 1–12.
Decataldo, A., & Andreoni, E. (2026). Being (a) patient: Navigating desire through online communities in assisted reproductive technology. Frontiers in Sociology, 10, 1683860.
Delli Paoli, A., & D’Auria, V. (2025). The digitalization of ethnography: A scoping review of methods in netnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 54(4), 559–587.
Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press.
Geiger, R. S., & Ribes, D. (2011). Trace ethnography: Following coordination through documentary practices. Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.
Günel, G., Varma, S., & Watanabe, C. (2020, June 9). A manifesto for patchwork ethnography. Member Voices, Fieldsights. Society for Cultural Anthropology.
Kozinets, R. V. (2020). Netnography: The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research (3rd ed.). Sage.
Otto, T. (2013). Times of the other: The temporalities of ethnographic fieldwork. Social Analysis, 57(1), 64–79.
Convenors’ bio
Alessandra Decataldo is Senior Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research combines qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches, with particular attention to innovative and participatory methodologies. Her main research interests include health and wellbeing, gender inequalities, parenthood and reproductive trajectories, and science and technology as social practices. Her recent work has explored ethnographic and netnographic approaches to healthcare settings and online communities, including assisted reproductive technology and neonatal intensive care. She is a member of international methodological research networks and has extensive experience in coordinating interdisciplinary research projects.
Elena Andreoni is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, and a research collaborator at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research interests lie at the intersection of mixed-methods research, netnography, health, gender, reproductive studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Her recent work examines digital communities surrounding assisted reproductive technologies, focusing on platform affordances, interactions, and the entanglement of online and offline worlds. She also works with participatory and creative methods, including collaborative filmmaking, and has conducted research on late fertility and adoptive parenthood.